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Is the video tag in HTML5 a kludge? Yes. Is it more an ideal than a practical implementation? Sure. Can it compete with a commercial product that has been an accepted part of the web for over 10 years now? Perhaps not. Is it poorly implemented [wikipedia.org] in most modern browsers, with no agreed upon video codec [arstechnica.com] common to any two of them? Yep. Would it be getting any attention at all if Steve Jobs hadn't used it as part of his cheap excuse to block free flash apps from his iControlU line of products? Not likely.

But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?

But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?

That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.

Content "creation" with Flash is really a poor substitute for the real tools that are completely available on all the mainstream OSes- to the point of some of the better answers being available for free or next to it on all of the aforementioned.

If you're doing "content creation" on something like Haiku, I might understand slightly, but you should already understand that you might be on your own on things like this if you choose to run things like Haiku and other up-and-coming OSes.

For YouTube, the content creation isn't done on Flash. It's done in a video editor.

Flash is, however, the content delivery system, and that's of interest to the content creators. Or at least, the content deliverers, like YouTube. And both care a lot more about getting the content delivered to the vast majority of potential users than any other concerns.

Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ? Care to elaborate what you mean by that ? Because using html5 with youtube is actually a few clicks operation : http://www.youtube.com/html5 [youtube.com]

Here is what you do. take your video tag in a common format, use it. If it fails, by web standards, the tag is supposed to default to the contents of the tag instead.Put a video tag inside that in a format supported on other browsers. If it fails, by web standards, the tag is supposed to default to the contents of the tag instead.Put your flash video object inside of that.

What do you mean "man hours"? Transcoding can be scripted and automated with ffmpeg. You could probably produce the requisite HTML5 with Perl. No humans are involved in day-to-day operations of such a system, so where are the "man hours" you complain about?

The fact that Apple is trying to impose a proprietary codec it owns partially (h.264) as the de facto standard video codec for the next 10 years is NOT consubstantial to HTML5.

HTML 5 is an open source open standard, and the fact that some companies(and by some I of course mean Apple) are trying to impose their solution as an inherent part of the open solution that is HTML 5 is just BULLSHIT.

HTML 5 is NOT h.264. and HTML 5 is NOT responsible for the codec war that mozilla Google and Apple are waging.

Not trying to be confrontational but I don't understand your comment and hoped you could explain further.

I took your comment to mean that even though there were better formats available, MP3 became standard because it was open.

My confusion is thus-1-when MP3 first started being widely used (I started using it extensively in 1997) it was competing with WAV files. There were no better formats.2- MP3s are only 'open' in the sense that they don't have embedded DRM. It is still a proprietary format with license fees attached.

He's generalizing, but there were no other formats that could do 12:1 compression like MP3 did when it came out. Few people remember that if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file. I still remember playing back a small little file with a.MP2 extension on a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1 and going WOW - thats amazing! (gives you kind of a timeline on how long ago this really was). It was some tune from Kimagure Orange Road.

ATRAC btw was only used internally at Sony for DAT and Minidisc (and later AT3 cd's) - there was never any way then to make or play back an ATRAC file on a home PC until somewhat recent history (and only then to try to lock people into using ATRAC over MP3).

CDs are up to 700 mb, the CD standard is 640 mb, most CDs are shorter. 50 mb is about average for a CD ripped to MP3 (amount of compression and length of CD makes this vary, of course), CD ripped to wav usually is around 500 mb.

I think his point was that we have the choice between one open and barely capable kludge and one closed but broadly supported and well understood kludge.

Personally I would rather buy a crutch for my broken leg so it can heal, then have a sprained ankle that I was "free" to walk on day after day until my foot fell off. Oops, sorry, I am taking BadAnalogyGuy's job away from him...

The problem is that something that's open might eventually work, whereas something that isn't probably won't unless it's on a blessed platform. Which is the point, if it's a site devoted to Windows or OSX, having content that's not particularly well available beyond those platforms is possibly acceptable. If it's general interest like Youtube is having it be restricted artificially to a couple platforms is clearly not acceptable. Admittedly there's only so much they can do or really should do, but this sort of artificial narrowing of the market is absurd.

At least with VP8 it's available to any platform at present, whether it's been ported is a moot point as the necessary bits to port it are available.

Flash kills battery life and stability. After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices and is likely to never be a good solution. The video tag is young, not quite there yet, and will probably be a better bet in the long run.

" After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices"
[citation needed]

Flash allows proper streamnig, video tag does not. Proper streaming needs a server side solution. If HTML5 isn't going to be ready till 2022 for a browser standard, how long will it take for a server-side standard?

I don't have any studies to cite. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox have all started running plugins in a separate process. This is primarily due to Flash taking down the browser repeatedly.Safari even added a special error message to keep people from hating the browser:http://fukamachi.org/wp/wp-content/photo/misc/flash_crash.png [fukamachi.org]

Before this was supported, I personally checked out the stack traces on most Safari and Firefox crashes. It was almost always executing a flash function.

Funny. YouTube HTML5 streaming seems to work find for me. Also do you really need a citation for Flash's performance? Try the following... Got to any laptop and open a YouTube video. Keep an eye on CPU. Now pause it and note the CPU cycles. Now Switch YouTube to the HTML5 beta and do the same. Big difference. HTML5 video which is paused uses 4% CPU while Flash paused uses 32%. NOTE: all of the videos were complete streamed before starting the playback. Also Pause is better than Playback because nothing i

Flash only kills battery life because of intense decompression and decoding -> high cpu usage. If flash is just a a container for h.264, and you use h.264 with your video tag, then what's the difference?

It's all down to the decoder. There's a dedicated processor in the iPhone which handles h.264. For the Flash player to be as efficient as any old h.264 you want to play on the iPhone, it would have to use that processor. However Adobe doesn't have the greatest history of using accelerated features (essentially dedicated processors for decoding h.264) of the hardware they target--in fact, they only recently started using accelerated decoding on Windows.

If they don't use the dedicated chip, then they're going to be using the main CPU. It's going to be far less efficient, both in energy usage and in CPU usage. And this applies to all portable devices with acceleration, not just the iPhone. Many laptops have acceleration via the graphics hardware.

Worse, of course, is what happens when you try to move to a platform that Adobe doesn't support? Want to use 64-bit linux? Too bad. Apple wants to change their decoder on the iPhone? They have to convince Adobe to adapt to the new one. That's vendor lock-in, and it's bad for the consumer.

No, flash implemented poorly kills battery life and stability, just as anything else implemented poorly. Until HTML5's video tag can implement things like RTMP, it's going to be playing second-fiddle to Flash, and that's just in terms of video playback. Flash's animations are already fantastically faster than anything HTML5's canvas can kick out.

Also worth mentioning, is that Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Google is a supporter of Open Source [google.com] with an open source operating system [blogspot.com]. If they did look at this from an outside, objective perspective, I trust Google will do anything they can to speed up HTML5 video support.

Also worth mentioning, is that Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Google is a supporter of Open Source [google.com] with an open source operating system [blogspot.com]. If they did look at this from an outside, objective perspective, I trust Google will do anything they can to speed up HTML5 video support.

But Google has sided with Adobe in their spat against Apple, and YouTube has a lot invested in DRM, at the behest of the media cartel. That DRM is included in Adobe products, and not in the html5 spec. That's an internal conflict for Google, and in the "principles VS revenue" conflicts, the principles rarely win.

I like the fact that I can jump to any part of the video and even direct people to that part of the video with a single url.

HTML5's <video> element supports JavaScript seeking [whatwg.org] to a new playback position. Your video page can read the fragment identifier from the URI, parse it, and then set the video element's currentTime attribute to make the player seek. The back end uses an HTTP/1.1 range retrieval [w3.org], the same thing that resumable downloads use.

it requires the video to find the first keyframe, and then play from there.

Ever noticed a delay in changing the channel on digital cable or satellite TV, or jumpiness when rewinding or fast-forwarding a DVD? A lot of that is waiting for the next keyframe. There is a tradeoff between bitrate and seek granuarity because more seekable encodes have to use more keyframes. In fact, a few codecs have an option to have a frame incorporate motion relative to multiple keyframes. Such a "B-frame" can use ordinary keyframes (I-frames), semi-keyframes predicted from prior keyframes (P-frames),

Or you can use RTMP with Flash Media Server, and have no delay at all. It supports seeking directly to non-keyframes. Which is kind of my point - Flash offers actual real streaming, complete with dynamic instant stream switching, not reliant on keyframes. HTML5's video tag offers none of that, instead relying on the crappy pseudostreaming method.

I think you miss the point. Flash is a poorly performing closed POS that makes video on the Internet beholden to a single vendor. That is a problem any way you slice it. It's unlikely that adobe will actually fix the situation unless they're absolutely backed into a corner.

Yes, the new unfinished standard doesn't have complete support in browsers yet. Whoop-dee-doo. The "no agreed upon video codec" thing is a bit of red herring. Safari, IE, and Chrome are all supporting H264 already, and unless WebM takes off, H264 is the de facto video codec standard of the decade. Whining about how much you love DivX isn't going to change that. Even Flash is supporting H264 (That's right! If you're arguing in favor of Flash, you're arguing in favor of H264 being the de facto standard). Blaming Apple for this is also silly. They made a choice based on what they believed would provide their customers with the best product. Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.

Everyone seems to forget one thing about this blog: it doesn't say that Flash is the holy grail for video streaming and that we should all flock to using Flash and put a ban on the HTML5 codec. No, the author of the blog applauds the efforts being put into HTML5 but warns that the video tag simply isn't finished yet. The moral of the story is that while HTML5's video codec is a great start, it's way too soon to put a ban on Flash because it still offers a lot of functionality that HTML5 does not. There still is valid use for Flash over HTML5.

Free browsers can support H.264 through system-wide codecs. Mozilla isn't going to do it and they give you an excuse when you ask them why not: they say Windows Vista/XP users don't have the codec preinstalled (and neither do they have Flash preinstalled, but that's apparently not a problem). Then they have a Stallmanistic desire for a completely free environment, and say they won't use support already present in your system, and for which you already paid (either directly or through your OS license). Other

"The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?"

This is why the Red Sox won't let me walk on and play right field. Free that doesn't work doesn't, well, doesn't work.

I'm waiting for the FOSS community to develop HTML5 addins that will work. Just remember, if such a thing happens, expect outfits like YouTube to capitalize on that and make money off the efforts of the fre

It's funny that a lot of these points end with something like "HTML 5 is working on it" or "HTML 5 is just begun" or "Hopefully they all merge to one." And that's the idea of an unfinished specification. With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).

Right now, YouTube might be forced to stick with Flash in regards to some videos but in the future I think we will see YouTube move as much as it can to HTML 5 and offer Flash as a premium service to content owners who want to deliver their content through Flash's DRM. And I'm fine with that. I don't care that you can redistribute videos of a snapping turtle laying eggs in my parent's garden.

Remember, YouTube is Google and Google has supported HTML 5 at least vocally and with their Chrome browser to the best of their ability.

I really don't like Flash but this does point out some interesting points.Also do we want HTML to have all the features of Flash?Things like camera and microphone control?Or even the ability to go full screen?And DRM?I don't like DRM but I do know that for somethings the choice will be DRM or nothing.Just a lot of really good points. It also shows how W3C really has blown it. They move to slow with adding features to browsers. I mean really we are just NOW adding video support to HTML? Really?How long ago d

Indeed. I found TFA particularly entertaining because it said 'we wouldn't be able to offer things like this' where the word 'this' linked to a page saying 'this is not available in your country'. I'm fairly sure that you don't require Flash in order to be able to not provide a service.

Of all companies, I'd expect Google to know that making bits uncopyable is not possible. Especially amusing since they cite RTMPE as an example of a useful feature, when RTMPE is broken and can easily be ignored by anything other than the official Flash player.

The point about streaming live events is a client issue. The spec allows any URL format, so you can use rtp:// streams, for example. Maybe Chrome needs to support these? Seeking is more important. HTTP lets you seek to a byte range, but how does that map to a location within the file? This could be worked around by putting this data in the header somewhere. Mind you, QuickTime seems to be able to seek within a remote file pretty nicely, so it must be possible...

Things like camera and microphone control?

Personally, I'd rather that my browser didn't have the ability for a malicious site to turn my laptop into a bug, and I suspect most corporate users feel the same way.

Or even the ability to go full screen?

This is actually one thing that I'd rather the browser did. Flash games, for example, would often be better played in full-screen mode, but unless they explicitly implement this support (which most don't), they can't. A standard way of making a div display full screen, with a standard browser UI so that it can't be done unless the user explicitly requests it, would be very nice.

I don't like DRM but I do know that for somethings the choice will be DRM or nothing.

'Nothing' works for me. If companies choose not to compete, that's their loss. The companies that choose to make their products available in a form that's useful can buy up their copyrights in a few years when they've gone bankrupt.

HTTP lets you seek to a byte range, but how does that map to a location within the file?

Find the known timestamps before and after the desired seek point, interpolate where you would need to seek if the part between known timestamps had a constant bit rate, and seek to that part of the file. The last article about Ogg vs. MKV [xiph.org] presented a test result that it takes on average 3.5 iterations of this algorithm to get to the right part.

This could be worked around by putting this data in the header somewhere.

AVI has such an index. Matroska (wrapper used by WebM) has an index. Ogg does not, but unless you're on a satellite link, four HTTP seeks won't kill you.

Yes, they're complaining about an unfinished spec, but that's a completely sensible thing to do. If you don't talk about all the problems with an unfinished spec, then how would you expect the problems to be fixed in the finished spec?

Flash will continue to be an important part of Youtube-- at least until HTML's "video" tag addresses some of these issues. Fair enough.

So how long should users wait for HTML5 to gel? The internet moves in its own measure of time, and HTML5 seems to be taking things at a glacial pace... we know all the issues surrounding the delivery of video content... YouTube has been using Flash to do it for 5 years now, and when was the first time you saw the dreaded "buffering" on a RealVideo clip on your Netscape browser?

HTML5 **should** be an established standard by now. Instead, a committee seems to be doing everything in its power to hold it back... what happened to the heady days of the internet when a standard popped onto the scene and quickly matured to give way for the next one? YES - many were not perfect, but that's why standards evolve. Instead, we now seem to be on this endless, "Duke Nukem Forever"-like quest to perfect the thing, even if it takes 10 or more years before it settles out.

What sort of insanity is that??!?

If HTML5 isn't a standard yet, and isn't suitable, then let's get cracking and establish what needs to be done NOW. We live in the Wiki-age... instant updates, instant results, instant gratification. We know what needs to be fixed, yet the response from the HTML5 folks is "it isn't mature yet, give it time!!!" - but if it's so fluid yet, and not "official" yet, why can't we make any changes to it??!??

The whole process is taking too long, and it feels like this "standard" is hardly fluid or forming, yet we are urged to give it time... time for what? Nobody wants to change it! So we wait years for a standard to "mature" even while it cannot, apparently be changed... meanwhile, YouTube and many other people will look forward to HTML6 to fix the mistakes that nobody will fix in HTML5.

The process has become broken. I don't know where the failure is, exactly, but when people complain about incomplete/malformed specs on a standard that WON'T change, but are told to wait for it to finalize, there is something wrong, even forgetting we are still being told HTML5 won't be "finalized" (even if it never actually changes) for YEARS.

what happened to the heady days of the internet when a standard popped onto the scene and quickly matured to give way for the next one?

They didn't last beyond the days when the net was only used by a small group of experts and highly technical users. The state of the web in the late 90s and the early zeroes (remember that?) was a direct result of following this sort of philosophy on an unworkably large scale, with multiple competing platforms with inconsistent feature sets (sometimes deliberately so).

A slow and inadequate standards process led to the browser wars. There were no standards for doing what people wanted to do with the web-- so instead of waiting for the WC3 committee (or whatever it was back then) to come up with a standard way, the two major browser manufacturers decided to do it anyway. And it's no surprise they did it differently. However, if the WC3 had provided robust standards early on for dynamic content, proprietary solutions would have been at a disadvantage.

Unlike previous versions of the HTML recommendations, HTML 5 will become a recommendation when at least two independent web browsers fully support the draft. Although there are obviously people writing the draft and making constant improvements to it, most (all?) of these people are also web browser developers. The draft is not being held up by some committee of random bigwigs in a dark smoky room.

That means if you're so impatient to see HTML 5 go from draft to recommendation, the proper course of action is

I don't think the reason the RIAA/MPAA dislike/distrust open standards is perceiving them to be insecure. Many fogey old businessmen probably see it that way. But RIAA are opposed to the entire concept of open software. Think about it.

You have a product that you send around to each other freely, no-one gets charged for it, there aren't many horrible legal altercations over it and the word 'steal' can't even be cutely mis-applied to the product. Abhorrent! If music were simply given away in a similar fashi

With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).

And in fact it's the exact opposite :Flash's DRM is a stupid joke - in short the key to decode the encrypted RTPME streams is a a couple of filestats of the ".swf" player application, i.e.: something publicly available. No password or crypto key involved (for a longer description, look for a mirror of RTMPDump [lkcl.net]). So there's no real encryption happening and as such, Flash' DRM might even not be covered by the DMCA or local clones.

HTTP's Authentication or Session and/or HTTPS provide already enough content protection at the hosting/serving level of the video. No need to add more DRM shit on the player level.

While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard.

DRM itself is an impossible dream. You can't give someone the keys to your house and expect it to be secure from them. It only takes one crack and the content is on the internet without DRM, making the "protected" content less valuable to the paying customer (or would be paying customer) than the pirate content.

Well, DRM should be more about transparency and enforcement than control. I think it'd be pretty straightforward to introduce a watermarking scheme, where everyone who purchases content for their use only gets its indelibly watermarked to their userid. Then if they go out and redistribute it, the copyright holder could hold them liable for distribution fees or whatever. You wouldn't be able to deny access to the protected works, but you'd at least be able to track who was showing what to whom and charge

You can also "re-size" that video straight to your hard drive and share it with 10,000 of your friends with a few clicks. This is why Flash (or some similar, DRMable software) will always have a need in the video distribution arena. Pirated content may be easy to come by, but content providers sure as hell aren't going to just give it away.

Flash may work for you but for me it is slow, buggy, doesn't support multiple monitors, doesn't support scroll wheels.

I dare you to find a mouse thatdoesnt have some sort of scrolling function. Flash doesn't support it. Even if flash does support it flash developers won't so itmight not exist.

As for multiple monitors I would love full screen video on one display while working on the other. Flash will never support it and topics in adobes forums on it are locked/deleted quickly. Whycant Ickes thevideosin the

Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.

The "we need DRM, otherwise we can't provide all the content we want to!" argument is horrible, stupid, and insulting.DRM does not allow businesses to provide content in new markets. DRM allows businesses to provide old markets in places where they make no sense. Every company which complains they can't do X without DRM really means they don't want to do X without magic fairy dust. Meanwhile, everyone and their grandmother is busy providing X without DRM, and the only difference is the companies which want magic fairy dust aren't getting paid.

Monopolies do not exist. People will always acquire the product they want, and if you aren't willing to sell it, all that means is that people will always acquire the product they want without paying you.

Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.

But that is done entirely server-side and is completely independent of flash vs HTML5 vs animated GIF vs ascii-art. You just make the server look the client IP address up in a location database, and then decide whether to send was was requested or an error message.

No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.

i guess the main issue is that is about basically putting a video file into html in the same way as one do a image. What flash do is a good deal more, as it handles all the UI elements and such related to that.

alone cant compete with flash. instead one have to look at +css+js+svg and then some wrapped into a single "entity" to get flash. But then there are different ways to the same solution. For instance, one reason mkv is popular as a video file container is that it can handle multiple audio and

Big surprise here, if you use a proprietary, closed plugin to deliver video with no regards to performance or user experience, then yes, you'll be able to deliver exactly within the use limits the media creators have demanded.

If YouTube truly thinks this is best long-term for its success, I'm afraid we'll watch a slow death as competitors nibble away market-share, one obscure platform at a time that lacks a flash player but was created to use open standards out of the box.

If YouTube truly thinks this is best long-term for its success, I'm afraid we'll watch a slow death as competitors nibble away market-share, one obscure platform at a time that lacks a flash player but was created to use open standards out of the box.

I don't think they do... Witness the various points in the article (Which I'm sure you read, right?) where they said "And we're helping to fix xyz problem"

But, what they point out is that HTML 5 video is untenable for even their short term success. If they went to purely HTML 5, they would lose market share rapidly to people who weren't pure OSS. What does that say, from a business standpoint?

But, what they point out is that HTML 5 video is untenable for even their short term success. If they went to purely HTML 5, they would lose market share rapidly to people who weren't pure OSS. What does that say, from a business standpoint?

It points out something remarkable and often overlooked: The market leader is pushing for open standards like it's business depends on it. That's the exact opposite of the (short) history of high tech: it's normally the marginal players that agree on standards to commoditize the market and gain share, while the leader "innovates" to keep everything incompatible. Google is pushing HTML5 to adopt more features so it can compete in a market of open standards, rather then making a gVideo player with lots of new

Translation: "We are at war with Apple and anything they support, we must now oppose. Thus, we are going to throw our support behind an buggy, laggy, piece of crap like Flash just so we can stick it to Apple a bit more in our ongoing effort to knock both them and Microsoft out of the picture. Thanks for your information, we will use it to make money."

Maybe I'm just getting jaded in my old age but I always seem to see nefarious reasons behind "business" decisions of late.

> Translation: "We are at war with Apple......the cry of the mindless blithering mindless fanboy.

YouTube is not just some consumer shill posting from his basement. They're runninga real video website and have real requirements. These requirements exist quiteindependent of your need to shill for your brand.

The very thing that allows Adobe to sandbag with features that have been supportedon Linux and Windows for years and on Apple for only a month also allows them to"secure" the content and make content c

Simply pointing the browser at a URL is not good enough, as that doesn't allow users to easily get to the part of the video they want. As we’ve been expanding into serving full-length movies and live events, it also becomes important to have fine control over buffering and dynamic quality control. Flash Player addresses these needs by letting applications manage the downloading and playback of video via Actionscript..

Flash Player's ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in allowing YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. Web site owners need to ensure that embedded content is not able to access private user information on the containing page..

HD video begs to be watched in full screen, but that has not historically been possible with pure HTML. While most browsers have a fullscreen mode, they do not allow javascript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page (such as a video player) to fill the screen.

All of these boil down to Youtube simply not liking how the browser they downloaded today, happens to play video. The thing is, nothing about today's implementation are damning of HTML5; they're just damning of today's implementations of it. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should initiate full-screen video (or any other "zooming" of content), not javascript. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should handle seeking. The browser or its lower-level networking library should be doing the buffering. And so on.

They are really praising HTML5's strengths here. Website creators shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging how the details of how a video plays, just like they don't worry about how to incrementally display an image, how to view an image full screen, or how to implement selecting and copying text. And yet, these guys are arguing that for video, they want their javascript programmers to have to work on that shit. The sane thing to do is to push it onto the browser guys (who can then push it onto the player guys, who may end up pushing some things onto the OS guys, whatever).

I won't even touch the DRM point, because I'm not in the DRM market so I can't imagine what kinds of DRM viewers are asking for.

The only points they have which has any real legitimacy, are the camera/microphone one and concerns about serving live content, rather that content sitting in some finished and indexed file. Yes, HTML5 video isn't really intended for that, so if youtube want to deal in those areas, they've got a point that using mere web tech isn't going to do they job; they need users to download applications (i.e. Flash code) instead. Fair enough; Youtube wants to get into new markets where they'll make some money. But for most of their video and pretty much everything Youtube is known for, HTML5 is the right answer.

I agree it's a horrible sentence - I only understood it after having read the article, and even then I had to read it about 3 times. People love to hate "grammar Nazis", but this sentence could have been so much easier to understand with a comma, and a couple small changes:

"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash, having major issues with features that the HTML5 tag does not, and may never, have."

I think that's what the person who wrote the summary was trying to say, but I can't be 100% cert